11/21/2015

"' KILLING ALL.... -EMAIL- ....

COMMUNICATION? "'

AROUND THE GLOBE, companies will spend more than $3 trillion on information technology this year, according to the research firm Gartner.

Nearly 1 out of 10 of those dollars is being spent on software like Slack. There is something of a gold rush today for companies making not terribly sexy but potentially lucrative office software adapted-

To the way people work now -from their smartphones, around the clock, passing information back and forth through the cloud.

PEOPLE ASK TWO QUESTIONS about Slack, the interoffice chat software used by some of the world's most closely watched companies.

The first is whether the 21-month-old startup is actually worth its $2.8 billion valuation. The second is whether is Slack changing how much of the world works.

If you've used Facebook or Twitter, you'll understand why Slack is so hot. The program -it's not that different from the instant messengers that were popular on the early Internet-

Helps different parts of the company communicate in real time.

Slack preserves every comment in one easily searchable archive, and all of those messages now skip your dreaded inbox. Slack's users, on average, spend 10 hours each weekday plugged into the application-

Which means for those who are already on it, getting work done increasingly looks like being in Slack.

WORK ON SLACK for a few days and you can see why people think it can kill the most dreaded form of communication : "Email".

Generally speaking in US, office workers send or receive 122 emails from the average email account every day, according to the Radicati Group, a research firm. If for the sake of argument, if not reality, you assume 9-to-5 shift, that's a new piece of-

Incoming or outgoing mail every four minutes. It is no wonder that Hillary Clinton, owner of the country's most scrutinized inbox, once asked an aide for a copy of Send : Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better.

A large part of what makes Slack better than email is how fluid its conversations are. The program -for which companies pay $6.67 to $12.50 per month per user -shows different parts of a business to set up different channels for discussions.

In this channel, the information technology group talks. In that channel, marketing meets. Anytime someone wants to alert you to something, he or she tags your name to a message, just as on Facebook.

You can follow your colleagues' exchanges in real time, or you can come back to that conversation later.

Slack's makers say this kind of software enables transparency. If you are not copied on an email or not included in a meeting, you might not have a clue why a decision was made. This can breed resentment and confusion.

Slack lets people who might have been forgotten or ignored look back and see why or how something happened.

''The current modes of communication are outdated, and there's an opportunity for a new thing,'' says John O' Farrell, a Slack board member and partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

At the Philadelphia-based Tonic Design, Slack helped new co-workers to get to know one another quickly after a recent merger.

And at Hendricks Automotive, employees have been able to move as far away as Canada and Turkey while staying connected to colleagues in Charlotte, N.C.

No doubt because it knows this increased connection can make people feel tethered to their jobs. Slack says it wants to tackle how much we work. The company is developing a do-not-disturb feature.

People won't be interrupted by messages between, say, the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., in whatever time zone they live in.

If you truly feel compelled to send someone a note during other person's off hours, the message won't appear in that colleague's Slack account until his or her do-not-disturb hours have ended.

The CEO worries about this more than you think. ''I think that we're as species not quiet equipped to deal with the power of this stuff just in the same way we weren't equipped to deal with infinite free calories. This is how people end up with diabetes,'' he says.

''We will now have cognitive emotional diabetes of interacting with people who aren't physically present.''

One solution maybe to take people out of the equation. This is where Slack's robots come in. These pieces of automated software can respond to simple questions about when a meeting is scheduled or-

What's for lunch in the company's cafeteria.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society: